In the Winter of 1967 a Special Issue of the French Literary Review Tel Quel Was Published Devoted Entirely to the Writing of the Marquis De Sade

296 French Theory and American Art Blanchot, Tel Quel and the Formation of a Sadean 297

In the winter of 1967 a special issue of the French literary review Tel Quel was published devoted entirely to the writing of the Marquis de Sade. 1 Bringing together the commentary of both those central to the review’s project and those with similar concerns, this publication formed one of a series of significant moments in the reception and so-called rehabilitation of Sade’s work amongst a new generation of post-Second World War writers and intellectuals. In the pages of Tel Quel one sees a confluence of theoretical and literary concerns invested in Sade’s oeuvre—as Patrick French says, Sade’s work was “the principle focus” of the review’s enquiry into “the relation of sex to writing.” 2 This investment in the figure of the writer was related to, and followed, the efforts of the publisher Jean- Jacques Pauvert, who during the 1950s and 1960s, in a direct challenge to the laws on obscenity in France, made available the author’s complete body of work. New York’s maverick pub- lishers Grove Press shortly followed suit, publishing Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, & Other Writings in English in 1965, and a series of other volumes thereafter. These publications were accompanied by extensive essays by an earlier generation of Blanchot, Tel Quel and the Benjamin Greenman French thinkers, including (amongst others) Maurice Blanchot, Formation of a Sadean Aesthetic whose essay was the first translation of his work into English. in the Work of Vito Acconci It was to the theorization of Sade’s work by this earlier generation of intellectuals that both contributors to Tel Quel and the American artist Vito Acconci were responding in the late 1960s. In fact, the 1965 Grove Press publication and Blanchot’s essay in particular, a translated excerpt from his book Lautréamont et Sade, was Acconci’s primary encounter with this constellation of concerns in the French literary avant-garde. A decisive factor of this historical moment, and con- centrated in the project of Tel Quel, was the theorization of écriture, which entailed an expansive concept of the text, and the formation of a set of literary precedents (so-called “limit- texts”) that questioned the notion of literature and articulated a political dimension within writing itself. Craig Dworkin, in an incisive account of the literary dimension of Acconci’s work, has consistently argued that there is a fundamental kinship between the contemporary literary and philosophical concerns in France and the procedures and preoccupations of Acconci’s

1 Tel Quel, no. 28 (1967). The publication included essays by Pierre Klossowski, Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, Hubert Damisch, and Michel Tort. 2 Patrick French, The Time of Theory: A History of “Tel Quel” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 97. 298 French Theory and American Art Blanchot, Tel Quel and the Formation of a Sadean 299 practice in the United States. In the latter half of the 1960s, account of Acconci’s notorious performance-installation Seedbed Acconci was an experimental writer with a growing reputation (1972), an exemplary figure of post-Minimalist de-sublimation, amongst the second wave of New York School Poets. Spurred is telling. For the duration of the performance the artist laid in on by the insight of Minimalism, he became a visual artist at a gallery underneath a raised, sloping floor. Responding to the the end of the decade, producing performances, films, installa- sound of the visitors above, he intoned erotic fantasies into a tions and what he described as photo-activities. microphone that were broadcast through speakers in the room; Although not all commentators agree or see its signifi- throughout Acconci euphemistically “produced seed” using the cance, Dworkin contends that Acconci’s art practice should visitor as a spur to his action. Dworkin’s remarks are brief but be understood as an extension of writing, rather than a shift instructive. He states that between two distinct fields of activity. This approach empha- sizes the continuity that the artist himself suggested in his [w]ith its connotations of both agricultural and comments on the development of his work, in which a pre- electronic media, “broadcast” conflates and col- occupation with the materiality of language, and in particular lapses the Latin semen (seed, from serere: to sow) of the written word on the page, provided the literal basis for and the Greek sema (sign), sema and soma (body), performative actions off the page. In broad strokes, one could microphone and phallus, the emission of the body say from this perspective that Acconci’s work supports and (semen) and the generation of its medial commu- exemplifies the accepted view that there was “a new kind of nications (semantics, semiotics). 5 textuality,” with an insistence on the possibilities of the signifier rather than the signified, which became common to “all What this extremely condensed statement proposes is essen- the arts” during the period under discussion; Acconci’s prac- tially a form of embodied textual production. Not solely an tice in particular literally traversed this field in its expansive interaction between artist and viewer, it elaborates a meta- movement. 3 phoric operation, an operation in language synonymous with In seeking to account for the breadth of Acconci’s pro- sexual activity. In this regard, it can be seen as comparable cedures of writing and subsequent production of visual art, to what Philippe Sollers, in his essay for the aforementioned Dworkin has employed Jacques Derrida’s contemporaneous issue of Tel Quel, described as the ultimate goal of the Sadean philosophical account of écriture, and specifically his notions of project, namely, the “perpetual movement of sex-language.” 6 the grapheme and différance. These were certainly important Dworkin therefore proposes, even without reference to authors ideas for the elaboration of a theory of writing amongst con- such as Sollers, a connection between écriture, the body and tributors to Tel Quel. And, while Dworkin acknowledges this sexuality. However, it should be noted how much of what one significance (as he remarks that those best placed to understand might expect of the concerns discussed in the pages of Tel Acconci’s work were “those Francophile intellectuals attuned Quel, a meeting point of psychoanalytic theory and structural to the écriture being theorized by Tel Quel . . .”), his account linguistics, are absent: there is no unconscious, no repression, refrains from relating writing to a theory of sexuality. 4 To this no desire, no experience of limits and no jouissance. extent, what is particular to the group’s reading of Sade and At the same time, this was not the language in which what Acconci’s reputation is inextricably connected with, that Acconci saw and described his work, either. In fact, the pro- is, the use of the eroticized body as the basis for performance, found silence on matters of sexuality in the artist’s theoreti- is secondary to a particular notion of writing, albeit one that cal notes is striking, despite the fact that he theorized his does not in itself preclude a discourse on sexuality. Dworkin’s work endlessly. The conceptualization of his work, from 1969 onwards, consisted of a quasi-scientific theoretical framework 3 Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” in The 60s Without Apology, eds. S. Sayers, A. Stephanson, S. Aranowitz, and F. Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 200. 5 Craig Dworkin, “Fugitive Signs,” October, no. 95 (Winter 2001): 110. 4 Craig Dworkin, introduction to Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci, 6 Philippe Sollers, “Sade in the Text,” in Writing and the Experience of Limits, ed. David Hyman ed. Craig Dworkin (London—Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), xiii. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 58. 300 French Theory and American Art Blanchot, Tel Quel and the Formation of a Sadean 301 that drew on the ideas of Kurt Lewin’s topological psychology, at no stage does she look back. Hence, despite the intensity of Erving Goffman’s sociology of interaction, and Morse Peckham’s the physical struggle, and the evident anguish and pain of the behavioral theory of art. Notably, there is no specific discourse ordeal, we are ultimately met with a refusal, as the unfolding on pleasure or sexuality, and although psychoanalytic ideas are of the performance makes abundantly clear. The work evokes not entirely absent, they were primarily understood through the profound sense that beyond force there is an unattainable Lewin’s conceptualization of dynamic models. Therefore, there reciprocity. is no programmatic erotic dimension to the work, something From the perspective of the current literature on Acconci’s one would expect in relation to Sade’s work. And, equally, an work, especially following Amelia Jones’s interpretation in economy of pleasure and pain, again another expected feature, the 1990s, this work is most likely to be understood as an inter- is replaced by a work that approximated the positivism of the rogation of masculinity and the normative force of the gender- social sciences. ing of power. From this perspective, Pryings is a particularly Nonetheless, Acconci’s work has often been discussed poignant instance in which the male subject fails to sustain his in relation to sadism. In the artist’s numerous performances will and mastery in his actions. The resistance to his volition that frequently employed the artist and an (implied) audience exposes its limits. Jones observes that the woman “repudiates or the artist and a woman (Kathy Dillon), there are notable his attempt to make her react to him and thus to confirm the moments of (sexual) aggression as well as defined positions of effectiveness . . . of his activity.” 8 It is by staging this failure domination and submission between participants. Critics have that Acconci’s work, in her view, questions the normativity of invariably described this in terms of the opposing moments of gender and power in the institution of art and society as a whole. the Freudian drive, the respective active and passive positions According to this view, narcissistic subjectivity, the relation of sadomasochism. However, in contrast to the French tradition of self to self which grounds masculinity, is undermined here under consideration, there was a recognition that the writing by the failure to “transcend” the suppressed “immanence” of of Sade (and Sacher-Masoch, for that matter) should be seen corporeality embodied by the woman. Acconci’s work, Jones on its own terms. The fact that Acconci has acknowledged the contends, interrogates “the dynamic by which normative mascu- significance of Sade’s writing entails that what will be explored linity requires the expulsion of otherness to sustain its mythical in this essay is the specific relationship between a body of work claim of coherent plenitude and empowerment.” 9 and set of ideas. The interpretive problem is that, despite an This interpretation provides an important reminder of explicit thematics of sadism in his earliest published writing, the political dimension of the artist’s practice, which he has there are few ostensive signs of such a direct precedent in retrospectively described as ultimately aiming at revoking Acconci’s work after its materialist turn. 7 power. As he remarked, his practice was about the “dissolu- The video Pryings (1971) is, however, a work that does tion of the illusion of identity,” which “meant the dissolution invite consideration in these terms. In this video, a seventeen of the illusion of unity.” These means would have as their final minute recording of a live performance, we see a fraught and effect “the dissolution of power.” 10 In addition to the specific extended struggle in which a man, Acconci himself, repeatedly interrogation of masculinity, therefore, there is a broad set of attempts to force open a woman’s closed eyelids. She unsur- anarchist principles underlying this specific aim. Applicable prisingly struggles to break free but each time he restrains equally to individual identity as to the governance of institutions her with his body. He grasps at her face, straining to pry her and states, the motive was the absolute negation of all forms of eyelids apart. In several instances we glimpse the whites of her power. As David Wieck remarks, anarchism can be understood eyes. It appears then that he may have achieved his goal but in a broad sense as “the generic social and political idea that

7 As an example of an explicit allusion to Sade’s work one might consider the title of 8 Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Acconci’s 1974 installation Pornography in the Classroom as a timely and pointed riposte to Press, 1997), 134. Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom. Sadism and domination are explicit themes of an early short 9 Ibid., 136. story by Acconci published in the magazine Olympia. See “Vito Acconci,” in Entails, Heads and 10 Jeff Rian, “Vito Acconci: I Never Wanted to Be Political; I Wanted the Work to Be Politics,” Tails, ed. Paola Igliori (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), n.p. Flash Art, no. 174 (1994): 85. Photographs of Bernadette Meyer from Vito Acconci, Pryings, 1971. Black & white video, 17 min 10, with sound. Courtesy Vito Acconci and Bernadette Meyer ©

302 French Theory and American Art Blanchot, Tel Quel and the Formation of a Sadean 303 304 French Theory and American Art Blanchot, Tel Quel and the Formation of a Sadean 305 expresses negation of all power, sovereignty, domination and real significance for the artist. He has subsequently described hierarchical division and a will to their dissolution.” 11 the literary critic’s essay as “this incredible piece,” noting that These concerns should also be seen in relation to the it was this particular view of Sade that “shaped a lot of things” development of Acconci’s work, as they range from writing in his practice. 14 to a visual art practice. Although rarely pointed out, there As a precursor to later theories of écriture, Blanchot’s is an evident preoccupation in Acconci’s work, following the interpretation is marked by its own set of preoccupations, abandonment of writing, with the act of looking and the figure which, as I will suggest, are also found in Acconci’s practice. of the eye. In this light, Pryings may be understood less as The act of reading Sade in Blanchot’s view was both an effect an interaction between participants and instead as figuring of movement in the literary work as well as the marking out a relationship to meaning or signification. This would in fact of distinct moments in the experience of the Sadean subject. be consistent with the artist’s writing, which had questioned Blanchot pays attention to the philosophical trajectory of Sade’s the semantic register of literature through an emphasis on thought as espoused by the author, the characters of his fiction the materiality of the signifier. Acconci notes that his action and the interaction between these characters. It is in these in the performance can be understood as an attempt “to make terms that Sade’s work appears as an “obsession” or “excess” her see”; that is, to participate in or come-to-awareness of a of Reason. 15 It is a work consisting of extensive elaborations given meaning. 12 On this view, the work can be understood of theories and proofs, and one that in Blanchot’s conclud- as exposing the violence inherent in the production of meaning summation has “the effrontery to present as a logical and ing. On the other hand, the artist suggests that she might be universal theory a system the sole guarantee for which is the understood as “fighting herself” and “her desire to look things personal preferences of an aberrant individual.” 16 over.” 13 In this case as well, there is an internal suppression One can imagine the appeal of this statement at the end (akin, perhaps, to the psychoanalytic idea that the force of the of the 1960s, not necessarily as a discourse on pleasure but as superego is fundamentally derived from the aggression that a discourse on reason. Sol LeWitt’s assertion in “Sentences the subject turns back on itself) and equally a violence in the on Conceptual Art” (first published, not insignificantly, in the desire to know, which is a desire without limits. This is after magazine 0 to 9 edited by Acconci and fellow writer Bernadette all exactly what the title, the artist’s own peculiar coinage, Mayer) that “[i]rrational thoughts should be followed absolutely “pryings,” means—to overstep the mark, to be too inquisitive, and logically.” 17 Undoubtedly, this takes on particular force too invasive. This signification is literally acted out on the when considered through the lens of Sadean practice. What organ of sight, the putative origin of the desire for knowledge. the discrete, one-off actions by Acconci effected, which often There is, in this respect, an apparent self-reflexive figure of seem perverse in isolation, was—to recall the words of the signification: the Other’s jouissance, which is beyond limit, is artist—to make “public . . . not so much finished pieces but tortuously exacted upon the (erogenous) threshold of the scopic a process of working.” 18 In their conceptual rigor, the artist’s drive. To pry apart the eyelid is to bring the person to sense. individual actions are understood as elements in a singular yet It is equally a prying that exposes the excessive character of multiplicitous activity that is akin to the force and constancy of the desire of Reason for meaning and knowledge. In these terms one begins to see the proximity of Acconci’s 14 “Interview with Acconci” in Benjamin Greenman, De-Aestheticisation and the Thematisation of practice to Maurice Blanchot’s interpretation of Sade’s writ- Intersubjectivity: The Work of Vito Acconci, 1969–1974 (PhD Diss., University of Essex, 2006), 341. ing. Acconci first read Sade in the second half of the 1960s. 15 Maurice Blanchot, “Sade,” in Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, & Other Writings, trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 39. But more than Sade it was Blanchot’s interpretation that had 16 Ibid., 70. 17 Sol LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” reprinted in Art in Theory, 1900– 1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: 11 Quoted in Gerald Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore, MD— Blackwell, 1999), 837. London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 29. 18 David Rosenberg, “Notes from a Conversation Tape with Vito Acconci, July 22, 1971,” in Six 12 Vito Acconci, “Pryings,” Avalanche, no. 6 (1972): 50. Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, ed. Lucy Lippard (Berkeley— 13 Ibid. Los Angeles—London: University of California Press, 1997), 244. 306 French Theory and American Art Blanchot, Tel Quel and the Formation of a Sadean 307 the writer. 19 Blanchot, in describing the cold reasoning of Sade, Death Spoken observed that “his theories and ideas are constantly generating and unleashing irrational forces to which they are bound.” 20 Negation is not a term one readily finds in Acconci’s theoretical In a movement where these forces resist, are circumnavigated and explanatory writing. Nevertheless, it plays a fundamental and overcome, the discourse of reason, in Blanchot’s words, role in Acconci’s work; his performance Directions (1971) is reaches a movement in which “finally everything is expressed, exemplary in this regard. In the performance, which lasted is revealed, but also everything is plunged back again into the approximately two hours, the artist lay blindfolded on a mobile obscurity of unformulated and inexpressible thoughts.” 21 As platform in the center of a room surrounded by an audience. with Acconci’s practice there is an exacting and absolute logic The performance consisted of a simple repeated action. Acconci that exists in the transparency and lucidity of public discourse. rotated the platform, disorientating himself, until he reached a For Blanchot, this disclosure is simultaneously a concealing point of exhaustion. Once the platform came to a stop he thrust opposing this totality. One can now begin to appreciate how out his arm and forefinger towards the audience and exclaimed Pryings, although a singular work, figures a movement of writ- “I want you to drop dead . . . whoever I’m pointing at, I want ing that is distinctly Sadean, a movement in which reason is you to drop dead.” 23 The meaning of the work revolves around in excess of reason. the simple act of pointing, and this is accompanied by a claim Regardless, Blanchot’s interpretation of Sade was a concerning the addressee’s existence. This is an egregious, response to a specific constellation of philosophical concerns undoubtedly preposterous gesture: the mere utterance of a current in France back then; the book Lautréamont et Sade was state of affairs does not itself make those circumstances occur. originally published in 1949. As has been widely recognized, In the notes that accompany the work the artist the- his reading of Sade is fundamentally an engagement with the orizes the performance as the communication of a physical philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel. Equally, Blanchot, together with state. As he explains “my attempt is to transfer, spread out his contemporary Emmanuel Lévinas, thought through the my exhaustion.” Significantly, he adds in parentheses that “my implications of the work of Martin Heidegger. These points exhaustion can cause an ultimate exhaustion—death—in the of reference are entirely absent from Acconci’s reception of audience.” 24 The pointing finger is understood not as just indi- the work, and it is for this reason that one must assume that cating a particular person but also conveying a physical state, it is from within the co-ordinates of Blanchot’s reading itself a fatal fatigue that annihilates its addressee. As such, the work that he oriented his thinking. At the same time, one cannot curiously comprises a physiological process that takes place maintain that Acconci’s work embraces a libertine philosophy across an intersubjective dimension beyond normal physical as articulated by Sade, for the simple reason that it is at odds circumstances. with the artist’s own questioning of power. In what follows The notion of exhaustion expressed in the work builds I will argue that it is not eroticism as such (which Blanchot upon a set of ideas about performance that Acconci first for- refers to, in its obvious allusion, as the libertine’s “Declaration mulated and published in 1970 under the title “Some Notes of the Rights of Eroticism”) but rather the basis of the sadist’s on Activity and Performance.” The “Notes” concern two main certainty of pleasure, the act of negation, that is central to how themes: forms of interaction and the dynamics of performance. Acconci understood the implications of Sade. 22 According to Acconci, feedback is fundamental to these dynamics because it provides a coherence and focal point to any action. As such, it contrasts with a state of diffusion in which, 19 Referring not to Sade but to Faulkner as his precedent, Acconci points out that “his lack of desire to finish a sentence, his sense to keep on going beyond where you could possibly he observes, the “line of action” is “weakened by emergent follow . . . with so many reconsiderations and hesitations and alternatives . . . seem to be . . . forces in the surrounding field” and becomes “increasingly trying to subvert a fantastically conservative framework.” Rosenberg, “Notes from a Conversation Tape with Vito Acconci,” 244. 20 Blanchot, “Sade,” 39. 21 Ibid., 63. 23 Vito Acconci, “Directions,” in Avalanche, no. 6 (1972): 58. 22 Ibid., 40. 24 Ibid. 308 French Theory and American Art Blanchot, Tel Quel and the Formation of a Sadean 309 unpredictable.” 25 It is in this context that fatigue holds a privi- they take on meaning for him, and he in turn created them leged position. Acconci maintains that “[t]he performance can out of the death into which they had disappeared.” 29 This is continue to a stage of exhaustion, when the specific channel of the movement of negation whereby things-in-themselves are adaptation is broken down—the reaction spreading over dif- annihilated and become things-for-consciousness; their being ferent areas—and momentum is retained for a while after the as things is replaced by their being as meaning. Negation, shutoff of power.” 26 Acconci continues: therefore, is foundational to the institution of language, and all signification is subsequently animated by this original act. In the stage of exhaustion, the performer is poten- In Acconci’s Directions the mere act of designation is tially vulnerable. A performance can provide an understood as equivalent to death, introducing Blanchot’s the- occasion for wearing out his channels of resistance matic of negation by language. What then seemed to be an odd and rules of order; it can shift into explicit focus articulation expressed by the artist—his desire that the person what is ordinarily unattended to. 27 designated die—may in fact be understood as a primary act of language. As Blanchot states: Acconci gives to exhaustion the fundamental functions of negation and bringing to attention. In this moment an awareness My speech is a warning that at this very moment like consciousness comes to pass, but one which is not the death is loose in the world, that it has suddenly result of an intentional act. Rather, there is an assertion in appeared between me, as I speak, and the being this instance of facticity that occurs in the wake of governing I address: it is there between us as the distance that laws, which are, in Acconci’s terms, both natural and social. separates us, but this distance is also what prevents This, I suggest, should be understood as a fundamental moment us from being separated, because it contains the in the artist’s work. It is a de-personalized instance of aware- condition for all understanding. 30 ness. However, in itself this does not explain the work’s most surprising aspect, namely, the intersubjective projection of fatal fatigue as embodied in the deictic gesture. The Threshold of Negation In the essay that Acconci read, Blanchot describes the movement of literature, at the heart of which is the funda- Confirmation of this implicit understanding of language can mental work of negation. This relationship between literature, be found in Acconci’s writing of the latter half of the 1960s. language, and negation was stated decisively by Blanchot for As briefly mentioned above, the focus of this writing was on the the first time in his earlier essay “Literature and the Right to “materiality” of words, their interaction and presence on the Death,” a text widely recognized as a fundamental statement page. Acconci recalls that this emphasis was motivated by his of the author’s ideas. growing awareness that the mimetic and referential function of Sade’s body of work is seen as enacting a negation foun- language was no longer possible. Instead, he sought procedures dational to language and writing. Blanchot subscribes to a and forms of language that referred to language itself and the philosophy of language in which language attains meaning space of the page. These included, on the one hand, figures of through the negation of what it refers to. Drawing on Hegel’s speech—which do not refer to things in the world and only have early writings, Blanchot contends that “God had created living meaning as language—and, on the other, the shifter. The latter things, but man had to annihilate them.” 28 Adam’s first act of comprise words such as “then” and “there,” whose sole function naming was foundational in this respect: “Not until then did is to designate rather than signify. However, it is clear from his work that Acconci was equally fascinated by the paradoxi- 25 Vito Acconci, “Some Notes on Activity and Performance,” Interfunktionen, no. 5 (1970): 138. 26 Ibid. cal nature of this non-mimetic endeavor. His writing signals 27 Ibid. 28 Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte 29 Ibid. Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 323. 30 Ibid., 323–24. 310 French Theory and American Art Blanchot, Tel Quel and the Formation of a Sadean 311 what the evacuation of the referent meant. This is evident in is, as Simon Critchley remarks, an “anti-Heideggerian thought an untitled poem written in 1967 where the use of the literal that dread is not dread in the face of death . . . but rather that space of the page poses a relationship between language in its dread is had in the face of existence itself, of being riveted to referential function and the object designated. It reads: existence.” 32 This insistence of existence without beings is at the same time a cessation in time, where there is no beginning I looked up at it and then it was down when I looked or end. Blanchot describes it variously as the “obsession” and there, every which way, until I had asked, “What?” “impossibility of emerging from existence,” and, conversely, after it disappeared, it did. as “death as the impossibility of dying.” 33 Negation in this sense I read that, having looked up at it as I raised is shown to be unable to conquer death, or, to be more exact, my hand, and then it was down when I put it and dying. As Blanchot stated in a later discussion of Sade there I looked there, every which way as it happened to go, is a “death of which one does not die,” and “a death without until I had asked in passing, “What?” after it disap- power, without effect, without achievement.” 34 Exhaustion, peared inasmuch as it was taken away, I did that. which appeared as a “cause” of negation in Directions, becomes indistinguishable in this earlier poem from its obverse—a fun- Here, Acconci purposively stages the discrepancy between lan- damental condition of lassitude in which the work of negation guage and the object it designates. It is a relationship of non- is powerless. coincidence where the very act of apprehension works against In Blanchot’s account, this condition of lassitude its own aim. From the start, “it” is displaced in time (“then”) appears marginal to the dominant sense of the Sadean logic. and space (“there”), only to disappear with the question that For Blanchot, Sade’s work is exemplary in that it makes evi- demands its comprehension, its meaning (“what”). What the dent a movement fundamental to literature, a movement that poem implies is the sense that even with its disappearance there without pause proceeds from nothing to everything. According is nevertheless a presence that exerts itself in the absence of to Blanchot, the work of writing, its “realm of imaginary,” is the object. Seen in relation to the founding act of negation, a world in its entirety but one that, following the theology of as exemplified byDirections , what one finds here is a pres- the word, is grounded in nothingness. As he writes, ence that remains even with the negation of the thing. Using Blanchot’s phrase, this remainder can be described as a being it is the world, grasped and realized in its entirety “that in the depths of annihilation still returns to being.” 31 by the global negation of all the individual reali- And this is suggested in particular by the peculiar reversal of ties contained in it, by their disqualification, their the phrases in which the “object” has an implicit priority, even absence, by the realization of that absence itself, despite or exactly because of its non-appearance. The inten- which is how literary creation begins. tional act directed towards it (“I looked at it”) immediately becomes a passive act (“then it was down when I looked there”) And he continues, commenting on the act of writing, determined by this presence. What the poem shows is that the work of negation does when literary creation goes back over each thing not annihilate entirely, that there is a pressing presence beyond and each being, it cherishes the illusion that it is negation. This is the notion of the il y a, the “there is,” a notion creating them, because now it is seeing and naming Blanchot picked up from the work of Emmanuel Lévinas. It is a them from the starting point of everything, from the postulation of the exteriority of Being in Heidegger’s formula- tion of the ontological difference, where, in the absence of all existent entities, there is nevertheless a presence of Being. This 32 Simon Critchley, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London— New York: Routledge, 1997), 55. 33 Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” 328, 332. 31 Ibid., 332. 34 Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community (Barrytown: Station Hill, 1988), 49. 312 French Theory and American Art Blanchot, Tel Quel and the Formation of a Sadean 313

starting point of the absence of everything, that is, as equivalent to but absent from the other. As such, the series from nothing. 35 of photographs must be seen as moments unseen by the artist during the performance. In this sense, they are holes in the Literature is a movement from nothing to everything travers- continuity of the artist’s visual field. As a sequence in their ing the totality of the original negation on which language own right, that is, as a differential system of signifiers that is instituted. It is the movement in which a tenacious and signify movement and perception in space and time, they imply indefatigable reason reaches a moment in which “everything a continuous visual field, doubling the assumed origin of the is expressed.” 36 Yet this is not a simple accomplishment of the work. Therefore, the two complementary visual fields suggest work of negation but rather a paradox of the power of tran- a condition of full vision from which these photographic rep- scendence. Blanchot argues that Sade acknowledges a modern resentations are simply excerpts. notion of transcendence insofar as he recognizes that “to anni- Like the act of designation in Directions or the writer’s hilate everything is not to annihilate the world, for the world act of naming, the production of these photographic represen- is not only universal affirmation but universal destruction as tations can be understood as the achievement of negation, in well, and can be represented alike by the totality of being and which representation and meaning replace the brute referent. the totality of non-being.” 37 Incidentally, Roland Barthes described the effect on the referent as a “micro-version of death” by drawing a comparison to the rigidified, armor-like body of a Sadean victim. 38 On this level, Acconci’s Micro-Negations the photographic representation—the absence that has become something in itself, a “blink”—putatively restores to sight its Arguably, this paradox of negation forms the basis of Acconci’s missing but essential element. The work of negation, therefore, photo-activity Blinks. This is one of the many performances and does not give a substitute but restores meaning to the realm of activities that Acconci carried out in the streets of Manhattan meaning. As Blanchot observes, in the everyday world one is during 1969, the year that his work moved off the page. It is satisfied with the meaning of the thing, which is the essence characterized by its minimal, almost incidental incursion into or life of the thing that survives its annihilation by the word. the realm of what already exists. In this performance, the artist However, on another level, the implied “natural” sight walked along a street with a camera held before his eye and of the artist is not actually a sequence of moments comparable resisted the impulse to blink. Each time he did blink however to the series of photographs. The photographic representation he released the shutter of the camera producing a photograph. is produced at a moment when the intentionally-directed body An understanding of this work develops from two related reaches exhaustion, when the “automatic” reflex asserts itself implications: firstly, that consciousness, perception and meaning in place of the intentional act. The body is therefore not given are prey to and interrupted by the body, specifically through as an active, intentional subject. Instead, it disappears in the exhaustion. Secondly, as an extension of the former, that the production of meaning. Thus, the “body” disappears in the body is opposed to consciousness, where apperception and double sense that it is the exhaustion of the body that “causes” perception are continuous while uninterrupted vision is syn- the photograph and that in this moment of exhaustion it is no onymous with a semantically transparent world. longer the body as an active, intentional subject. Acconci suc- The work is based on the analogy between “natural” cinctly makes the point, noting that “the place is seen as entered, vision and the camera’s “eye,” in which the “natural” reflex of disturbed by the body disturbing itself.” 39 In this sense, through the body is considered as equivalent to the shutter of the appa- restoring meaning the work also refers to an original, founding ratus. This produces two moments of vision, each understood

35 Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” 316. 38 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 2000), 14. 36 Blanchot, “Sade,” 63. 39 Vito Acconci, “Notebook Excerpts, 1969,” in Vito Acconci: Photoworks, Videos et Films 37 Ibid. Super 8, 1969–1972 (Geneva: École Supérieure d’Art Visuel, 1988), n.p. Vito Acconci, Blinks, Nov 23,1969, afternoon. Photo-Piece, Greenwich Street, NYC. Kodak Instamatic 124, black & white film. Courtesy Vito Acconci ©

314 French Theory and American Art Blanchot, Tel Quel and the Formation of a Sadean 315 316 French Theory and American Art Blanchot, Tel Quel and the Formation of a Sadean 317 negation, that of the exhausted “body,” absent but necessary In another variation on this theme Sade proposed an “infinitely to the production of the photographic sequence. protracted death for everyone,” indicating yet again the totality The work can be seen as repeating the paradox Blanchot and limit of the movement of the literary work as it is based contemplates in Sade’s writing, i.e., the tension between an on an original negation. In Blanchot’s terms, then, this infinite original, founding act of negation and the perpetual work of dimension is an impossibility—a dying, not a death—and one negation. This is the movement of literature which traverses the that is measured by the “interminability of dying.” 44 This is the totality of nothing and everything, and in doing so “cherishes condition wherein one is riven to existence, where the work of the illusion that it is creating . . . each thing and each being.” 40 negation becomes an un-working and death is without power. 45 This paradox is exemplified for Blanchot by the profound sense As Christopher Fynsk reminds us, the il y a is an “affirma- of unreality or weightlessness in the death of the Sadean victim, tion that is a failure of negation to negate itself.” 46 However, the bearer of the work of negation’s imprint. From this he draws rather than a moment of simple powerlessness, it can also be the conclusion that “if they disappear with such ludicrous ease understood as what Gerald Bruns described as “anarchy . . . it is because they have previously been annihilated by a total, understood in its original sense of that which is on the hither absolute act of destruction, because they are present and die side of principle and rule.” 47 only to bear witness to this kind of original cataclysm.” 41 There is perhaps an obvious point of comparison between Acconci’s photo-activity Blinks and his performance Pryings. The Event of Recognition Both works use the aperture of the eyelid in an action which at the same time concerns sight and the production of meaning. It becomes obvious that Blanchot’s reading of Sade, and spe- Blinks shows that the work of negation alludes to an origi- cifically the paradox of negation he examines, had a significant nal, founding negation. In parallel, Pryings makes explicit the bearing on the way Acconci conceived his work. The Sadean violence inherent in the production of meaning and reason’s dimension of his practice can be figured as a deepening of the basis in the work of negation. However, the later performance materialist turn in his writing, turning into an interrogation also announces a fundamental refusal of the work of negation, of meaning and representation in his later work. For Blanchot, a negation also present in the artist’s notion of exhaustion, the figure of the sadist and his victim(s) provided a reflection especially in its moments of reversal. on language and writing, and in this way Pryings and the other This finds confirmation in Blanchot’s text. He foregrounds works considered here are essentially figures of the violent the profound contradiction in Sade’s logic, in which the tor- process of signification. turer’s pursuit of sovereignty is fundamentally compromised It is in these terms that the political dimension of by their dependence on their victim. It is a limit that the sadist Blanchot’s interpretation of Sade was undoubtedly signifi- meets in his work of negation and which potentially marks his cant for Acconci as well. Blanchot understood Sade’s work as ultimate destitution. In speaking of Sade’s character Saint- inseparable from the French Revolution of 1789 and the Reign Fond in Juliette, Blanchot notes that “Sade’s heroes draw their of Terror of 1793–94. As Blanchot asserts, this is so because it sustenance from the deaths they cause, and there are times is in the revolutionary event that literature can contemplate when, dreaming of everlasting life, he dreams of a death he its own reality. It is a moment when “everything seems put can inflict eternally.” 42 This would be an act that fulfills itself in question, when law, faith, the State, the world above, the without relinquishing its support. Jacques Lacan described world of the past—everything sinks effortlessly, without work, this as the Sadean phantasy, the impossible support of desire. 43 into nothingness.” 48 As this quotation implies, the cessation of

40 Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” 316. 44 Blanchot, “Sade,” 54. 41 Blanchot, “Sade,” 55. 45 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 54. 46 Christopher Fynsk, Language and Relation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 234. 43 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII 47 Bruns, Maurice Blanchot, 32. (New York—London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1986), 261. 48 Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” 318. 318 French Theory and American Art Blanchot, Tel Quel and the Formation of a Sadean 319 historical time, and the re-founding of society, are for Blanchot Notes of Vito Acconci for A Situation Using Streets, Walking, Glancing, 1969. the very terms of the literary work’s embrace of the totality Courtesy Vito Acconci © of nothing and everything, founded on the original negation of language. In the same year Acconci produced Blinks, he undertook another seemingly innocuous task in the streets of Manhattan, titled A Situation Using Streets, Walking, Glancing (1969). In its conception, the work had a broader political scope than the seemingly incidental nature of the event. In the performance Acconci walked in a large rectangle on the sidewalk in a busy shopping area. It lasted for approximately three hours and through its repetitive circuit made possible that the artist could be seen twice, prompting the pedestrian to recall seeing him just minutes before. This unpredictable moment of recognition is essential to the meaning of the work, which Acconci is at pains to articulate in his notes. In the latter he defines the process of recognition as “to take notice of; to make out or to perceive to be something previously known.” 49 In the glance of an eye or the double-take where one sees the reappearance of a person or a state of affairs a separation occurs. It is equally a two-fold affirmation. His notes state that “to acknowledge the de facto existence of,” and also “to acknowledge the independence of,” is to “treat as independent or otherwise effective.” 50 There is thus an intentional structure in the moment of recognition, consisting of a two-fold coming-to-consciousness of the factu- ally given and its distinctness. However, these are not abstract speculations about perception and comprehension since the work is framed as having a political dimension. This is indicated by the examples the artist used to describe these two facets of the event. The recognition of something existing is exemplified, Acconci states, by our acknowledgement of a given “government in a state.” 51 It is particularly significant in this respect that what is given is there in its facticity rather than in its legitimacy (that is, rather than de jure it is given de facto). Furthermore, the example he offers of our acknowledgment of something’s independence or equivalent efficacy is “a community or body that has thrown off the sovereignty of a state to which it was subject.” 52

49 Vito Acconci, “A Situation Using Streets, Walking, Glancing,” in Vito Hannibal Acconci Studio (Barcelona: ACTAR—Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2004), 173. 50 Vito Acconci, Diary of a Body, 1969–1973 (Milan: Charta, 2006), 21. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. Vito Acconci, A Situation Using Streets, Walking, Glancing. Street Works I. Fifth Avenue, 48 th Street to 52nd Street, March 15, 1969. Black & white photographs of the artist. Courtesy Vito Acconci ©

320 French Theory and American Art Blanchot, Tel Quel and the Formation of a Sadean 321 322 French Theory and American Art

Recognition, therefore, is aligned with a transformation of political sovereignty. It can be regarded as the reiteration of a classic trope of the historical avant-garde: the alteration of everyday perception amounts to an awakening of a radical political consciousness, a consciousness that was equally a transformation of the world. However, in its structure this work bears the distinctive characteristics of the Sadean dimension of the artist’s practice. Recognition is in its potentiality the separation from a governing body and its laws and the foregrounding of the efficacy of an independent body. The entity gains efficacy in the instance through the rejection of an archon, a ruler or governing body, and archè, a founding rule or principle. The structure of the event is exactly the same as the double-negation in Blinks. At the center of that work was the moment of exhaustion that forms a vanishing point between the founding nothingness of the work of art and the production of meaning. It is also the figure of nothingness and negation that for Blanchot makes the revolutionary moment literature’s double. According to its logic, A Situation Using Streets, Walking, Glancing holds out a promise of efficacy based on its radical separation; it is nevertheless a negative moment without con- tent. This is, perhaps, an essential aspect of the dissolution of power that the artist declared as his ultimate goal. This suggests that the moment in question is not simply an exchange of popular sovereignty for state governance but the possibility of an efficacy in the wake of existing forms of power and authority, an independence that, again, in the artist’s words is “otherwise effective.” 53 Needless to say, Acconci’s practice was in many ways fundamentally different from Sade’s ideas and body of work. However, this essay explored the possibility to see how essential features of the artist’s practice responded to Blanchot’s distinct reading. The work of negation and, more importantly, its lassitude are fundamental aspects of Acconci’s practice. It is in these terms that one arrives at an understanding of the import of Acconci’s words when stating, seemingly offhand, that in exhaustion one wears out the “rules of order” and “shift[s] into explicit focus what is ordinarily unattended to.” 54

53 Ibid. 54 Acconci, “Some Notes on Activity and Performance,” 138.